“While the capitalists are winning every battle between the two classes, they are nonetheless losing the war.”

Insofar as Thatcher spoke for the capitalist class, there is indeed no alternative: capitalism today cannot survive in the cramped confines of the nation state. However, there is an aspect of her declaration that also applies to the modern social forces of production created by capitalism. These social forces have never been national and have always compelled capital to take increasingly global forms.

How much SYRIZA simply reflects the truth as it appears within the logic of the bourgeois simpleton remains to be seen. But even accepting this still does not escape the fact that the social forces of production have today become entirely incompatible with the nation state and national politics. Which is to say, SYRIZA’s politics may ultimately turn out to be merely a progressive variant of neoliberalism — and this may just be a final expression of bourgeois politics, rather than a true anti-politics — but in any case politics is dead.

Since the 1980s the Left has pursued a strategy that not only rejects Thatcher’s declaration, but refuses to recognize the global character of production. In one effort after another the Left has sought to overthrow neoliberalism but always in favor of a return to national state management of the economy. The reason for this is quite understandable: neoliberalism has resulted in globalization of production at the expense of the working class. But this reasoning is not defensible, since globalization of the production process has continued to develop despite numerous efforts to prevent it by the Left.

Globalization is not a policy of the capitalists, it is a process of formation of a single world market that is imposed on both worker and capitalist alike by development of the productive forces bound up with capital. Properly understood, neoliberalism is a policy where by the costs of this irresistable globalization is imposed on the working class by the capitalists.

While nothing can prevent globalization of production, there is nothing that states this globalization need take a neoliberal form. Globalization takes a neoliberal form because, even as globalization undercuts the nation state, the Left insists on relying on the nation state to counter neoliberalism. The very institution the Left relies on to fight the neoliberal impact of globalization is the one most fatally compromised by globalization itself.